RFC: requiring GCC >= 4.7 to build glibc

[David Miller]

From: Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>
Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:28:34 +0000

> Would anyone else like to comment on (a) the general principle of doing 
> time-based upgrades of the minimum GCC and binutils versions for building 
> glibc (so typically upgrade every other glibc release cycle, since GCC and 
> binutils have major releases about once a year) or (b) this particular 
> proposed increase?

It can be a pain to upgrade gcc, and in fact for me this is much
harder than updating the kernel for example.  If I upgrade gcc it
effects all of my development work, not just the work I do with glibc.

Yes I could just have a compiler in a separate PATH just for glibc
work, but that isn't convenient either.

I suspect a lot of people trying to maintain older architectures and
keep glibc working on them are in this situation too.

I understand the features/longterm-maintainence arguments, but like
-Werror and friends, there is a cost for contributors with less time
and resources than the most active contributors.

Just my $0.02